Catholics are really confusing: Marc, Emily and Audy Hall tell their story - Witness

Catholic New Times, Nov 3, 2002 by James Loney

I see two 14-year-old boys walking toward me on the sidewalk. I cross my fingers and hope for the best. "Hi. I'm a journalist and I'm looking for Marc Hall's house. Do you know where he lives?" I ask.

Having lost the slip of paper with Marc's phone number and the directions to his house, I had somehow found my way to this working-class street, located in the backyard of Oshawa, Ont.'s sprawling GM plant.

I am late for a meeting that took three months to arrange.

"Yeah, I know Marc Hall. He lives next door to me. We'll show you."

They want to know what I am going to ask Marc. "I might ask him how he felt when the school board wouldn't let him take his boyfriend to the prom." They snicker: "He's going to go to hell. I don't care what he does as long as he doesn't come on to me or nothing."

We arrive at the house. One of the boys blurts out, "I'm a skateboarder. Can you do a story about me."

I am welcomed into the Hall family home--a modest and impeccable duplex--by Marc's mother, Emily. She calls Marc to come down from his room where he is attempting to reconfigure a crashed computer.

"Do you know anything about computers?" he asks. I shake hands with Canada's most controversial 18-year-old--the blue-haired, tongue-pierced grade 13 student who threatens to turn the constitutional tables on Ontario's Catholic school system.

In May, he won a court injunction allowing him to attend his high-school prom with his boyfriend. The school board is appealing in an effort to defend its "denominational rights."

Emily offers me a glass of Sprite and we sit down to talk. I ask Marc how his summer was. "Oh my God; busiest summer of my life."

Glowing, he talks about being in Toronto's Gay Pride Parade, of being instructed by a lesbian bodyguard to "get down when I say get down," of being invited to Windsor, Ont. and Halifax, N.S. to be the grand marshal of their Pride parades, of giving a speech before 2,000 people.

I ask Marc to tell me about his coming-out story.

"I pretty much always knew," he says. "Even when I was younger, I knew I was `different.' Just talk to me for five minutes and you'll know I'm gay." He told a few close friends in grade 10, and then his brother Dan who is 33.

"When I first came out and people made fun of me, I was kind of hurt. Then I just got tired of being stepped on." In a grade 11 accounting class, Marc challenged a boy who had been taunting him. "I stood up and I said, `Yeah, I'm gay. Big deal!' That was when I didn't care anymore."

The next step was to tell his parents. At the end of grade 11, a few days after meeting Jean-Paul Dumond (the 21-year-old he invited to his grade 12 prom), Marc told his mother. While she was not surprised, she admits that "it was really hard at first." She, in turn, told her husband, Audy.

A few days later, the Hall family went to visit Marc's brother's grave. He died in 1995 of a brain tumour at age 29. Marc recalls how his father began speaking to his deceased brother while kneeling at his grave. "`You know, I realize that Marc's still your brother and he's still our son. We love him all the same and we're gonna support him the whole way.'

"My Dad got up and he looked at me and said, `I love you.'

"I said, `You're gonna make me cry,' and then we hugged. Me and my Dad never hug."

Audy joins us at the kitchen table. Emily and Audy have known each other all of their lives; they grew up across the road from each other in a French-speaking village in New Brunswick's Acadian Peninsula. They have been married for 39 years. Audy, 62, is a retired steelworker. Emily, 59, stayed at home to raise their three children.

Audy says that a lot of people praise them for supporting Marc. "To me, I don't feel like we're doing something that's so great. I'm just doing what I'm supposed to do--he's my child.

"Lots of people come to us, all young people, because their parent are rejecting them," Emily says. "There was one (person) during Gay Pride in Windsor. He said that he came just to meet us. Then he started to cry. `I see you with Marc--he's so lucky,' he said. It's so sad. His mom and dad kicked him out. They never supported him."

I ask Marc's father what he would tell the parents of a gay or lesbian' child who is not sure what to do. "You probably have a family album from when your son or daughter was small. Just look at those pictures and remember how much you loved them. They're still the same child you used to love. He hasn't done anything wrong. It's just the way he was born. It's a way of life God chose for him."

The discussion turns to theology. Marc says, "They say homosexual activity is not allowed because God made man and woman for pro-creation. But take two really devoted Catholic gays or lesbians. They don't have sex, but they fall in love with each other--is that wrong too? Is a gay guy not allowed to love anybody because he can't love a female? That would be denying who he is.

"Catholics are really confusing. There's this group of Catholics that says everything is OK with homosexuality, this group that says everything's wrong with it, and another group that says this is OK, but this isn't.